April 1969
This is a highly eccentric if overwritten and repetitive book. Essentially what Mr. Elgar is saying is that he finds Mondrian not just an interesting artist-painter but also an interesting man and he would like us to know this. This is perhaps for the non art public. Indeed in a book of this sort the real value is only in the profusion of illustrations; It's a kind of bedside book for gazing sleepily at the pictures. Mr. Elgar says nothing new about Mondrian. At one point he comments "...although he was our contemporary and had friends many of whom are still alive... his personality is still wrapped in mystery..." I suppose this kind of thing has always been around but I for one am a little bored. This necromantic psychoanalysis masquerading as History. Why in heavens name do we have to know so much about an artists personality to "read" what his paintings are about [perhaps there are plans afoot to make a film on Mondrian soon: title? The first real square].
If it is true that Mondrian didn't, after a while, do much socializing, isn't it at least as much to do with that need, which surely he shares with every committed artist, to stay in his studio? Mr. Elgar himself mentions some of the things Mondrian had to do to make money: it must have been the most galling of experiences, that kind of poverty. Enough, that is, to make the toughest spirits seek and emphasize the relative tranquility of the studio and familiar surroundings. Very few artists would fail to recognize this trait.
Again in talking about the geometry of aesthetics and Mondrian's possible use of it, Mr. Elgar says "...Mondrian might by chance have stumbled on divine proportion'. Nevertheless, I very much doubt that he did so intentionally, particularly as he made a point of breaking the relations between lines, planes and colours by graphic syncopation and discord..." I don't really get an argument here which convinces me that Mondrian didn't deliberately "use" [selfconsciously] this geometry. In fact quite the contrary. My reading of it is that there is ample evidence to support a claim that Mondrian did and it's just this factor which strengthened and made so powerful his statements. The lyrical quality which Mr. Elgar comments upon several times in this book: towards the close of the book he remarks apropos Mondrian's development "...Later a sudden blaze of lyricism gives animation to his pictures..." Surely it is not inconsistent to point out to Mr. Elgar that much as he's right, he's hardly original within the context of Mondrian's development. The point he's missed in indulging in that now quite disproportionate and arrogant fantasy [which is so fashionable among a certain kind of critic] about artists not knowing what they are talking about, is that when Mondrian said "...In my paintings after 1922, I feel that I approached the concrete structure I regard as necessary. And in my last pictures such as Broadway Boogie-Woogy and Victory Boogie-Woogie, the structure and means of expression are both concrete and in mutual equivalence..." That this is exactly what the man meant, and that that same "lyricism" was now ablaze in those last pictures he did here in New York. Mr. Elgar may agree with Charles Biderman that at this point Mondrian was going soft, and the pictures were not finished [when is a painting "finished"?] but the evidence is difference.—
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